Liz and Brace dive into Tribal Thumb, a shadowy 1970s Bay Area group linked to radicalism and People’s Food System co-ops, tracing its roots to the Watts Rebellion (1965) and Hunters Point Uprising (1966). They expose FBI informant Richard Aoki’s role in the Black Panthers—founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966—and Eldridge Cleaver’s rise after prison radicalization. The episode connects prison strikes (San Quentin, August 1970) led by George Jackson’s Soledad Brothers to broader demands like Geneva Convention protections for political prisoners, revealing how COINTELPRO weaponized divisions between gangs and radicals. Ultimately, it frames Tribal Thumb as a product of the era’s fractured leftist movements. [Automatically generated summary]
I think what I like about today's episode is that it's a little bit of everything.
We've got San Francisco.
We've got some good history.
We've got some important context about many things.
I'm going to just keep going.
And also a real smattering of freaks.
Yes.
Well, what I like about today's episode is that there's a lot of people in it.
Like in the episode?
In the episode, but doing the episode.
Yeah.
I think that's interesting.
Interesting?
Yeah, I just think it's interesting.
Like, it's crazy to me because think about this.
Like, oftentimes I feel like we talk about people, but we're outnumbered or whatever.
Like, there's so many people we're talking about in this episode.
What if they were all to come here at the same time and hurt us?
But today, I was like, there's fucking so many people in this room.
If someone came here and tried to hurt us, we could kill them.
Hello, everyone.
I'm Liz.
My name is Brace.
We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
And the podcast is, what's it called, Liz?
It's called Truanon.
Hello.
Hello.
Thank you so much for saying that.
You know, I like to take a beat.
I do.
I do.
And you know, I don't like to finish what I was about to say.
Yeah, there you go.
That's right.
Keep on charting.
We are equals.
We're not equals, like, in what way?
NBA Combos and Olympics Nicknames00:09:21
I don't know.
In what way are we not?
Stature.
You tower over me like an Amazonian.
This is people talk about me being short.
Weird giantess people.
Anything more.
Liz is 6'7.
It would be.
That would be so crazy.
The dynamic of this podcast would be extraordinary.
Here's the thing.
I'm going to.
You know what?
I'm putting my cards on the table.
I'm short.
Are you?
Yes. I don't know how.
How tall am I?
I...
I'm saying, no, you're not 5'2.
You're 5'4, 5'6, 5'8.
What's in between some of that?
5'3.
No.
5'5 ⁇ ?
I'm like 5'5 and a quarter.
Yeah, she's taller than average.
Is it?
Yes.
That's nice.
Yeah, the average is one.
That doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, the average person, well, because of babies.
So the average person is one.
Would you say this is the global average?
The mean?
I would say there's Liz Francis.
I think that I play taller than I am.
I noticed this a long time ago when I had been dating someone for multiple years and then could literally could not tell you if they were short or tall.
I think if you talk enough, it's hard to tell.
What does that even mean?
I just think that that's true for if a woman is vocal.
It's not like you're loud or anything.
I think it's when someone's loud, you really can't tell.
But if you talk enough, I'm just like, I don't really know how tall you are.
Speaking of tall and short, I just want to put it on everyone's radar that we have one of the potentially greatest combos of tall man, short man coming to the NBA when Chris Paul signed with the Spurs and will be paired with Wemby.
Wemby?
Wemby's the tallest player.
His name is Wemby?
Wembinana.
Yeah, but still.
We call him Wemby.
Who's the short guy?
What's his name?
Chris Paul.
He's like 5'11.
Wemby is.
That actually is really short.
Well, for basketball, it is.
And just for me.
Wemby's what, 7'2?
7'2?
Yeah.
7'4.
He's 7'4.
Is that have you never seen Wemby?
I'm looking him up right now.
There's actually not that.
He's such a Wemby.
Let me see him.
Oh, my God.
He's huge.
He spends his time reading.
What book is he reading?
All sorts of books.
He's French.
But like a paperback?
Yeah, it's quite tiny.
It's all in his hands.
Well, it's all pocket sized to him.
My God.
He'd have to read.
He'd have to do like iPad.
Wemby had one of the best quotes ever where they were in Vegas for some like expo show.
I don't know what it was.
I can't remember what it was.
But someone, the press like asked him, he was giving a press conference.
They're like, whoa, what do you think of Las Vegas?
And he was like, this is the worst place I've ever been in my entire life.
Like in that French, like disgust for American culture way.
That was very, very funny.
But anyway, he will be paired up with Chris Paul.
So we got a 5'11, 7'4 classic duo, short man, tall man.
I just wanted to put it on everyone's radar because that's, we're always talking about these classic duos.
Short man, tall man.
Yeah, big guy, short guy, fat guy, skinny guy.
Who's the shortest guy?
We've talked about this shortest guy in the NBA before.
Do you think that I could sue the NBA for not letting me join?
Because I'm not good at basketball either.
Well, so no, but that feels like that's wrong to not let me try to be good at basketball.
Because what if I had it in me, but I just haven't seen it?
I think you should show up to the NFL combine and see what you got.
They have a combine?
Yeah.
Combine of what?
That's where everyone does their.
That's where everyone does the.
Like they train?
Not train.
No, they like show.
Everyone has to kind of go through the same test, but you know, oh, you run this car.
And then you have all your stats.
That's the NFL combine.
But what if there's something ineffable?
Like, what if there's a certain genus equi?
Yeah, like you just have that just that something.
Yeah.
You know, like he's got it.
But he's not good at basketball.
Or football.
Or, well, we don't know.
Yeah.
I'd have to go find the other combine.
Do they have combines for everything?
I don't know.
I probably am really good at some fucked up sport.
Like, I bet I'd be great at cricket.
I don't think you'd be good at cricketing.
You don't think I could be on the Pakistan national team?
I don't know.
Are they good?
You know what's coming up is the Olympics.
You think I could do that?
No.
You know, I was a synchronized swimmer.
Yeah, but not Olympic level.
Well, because I decided to go to school and juicing.
No, Liz got caught juicing during it.
She drank the water.
You're not allowed to drink the water when you're a swimmer.
And Liz was just gulping that shit down.
I don't think you know how things work.
What do you mean you can drink water?
Oh, so, oh, I don't.
You can drink water.
Liz says, I don't know if you know how things work.
Sorry, can you not drink water?
I think, what about curling for you?
Curling?
Yeah.
It is sort of has been called a pizzle.
Where you just kind of like.
Oh, that thing?
Yeah, that seems too foreign.
That's like Canadian.
It is Canadian.
Yeah.
But they probably, I mean, but we probably don't have one.
What do curlers do during the four years between the Olympics?
They just practice for the next Olympics.
Yes.
If you're a curler who doesn't get on the Olympic team, you got to feel like a real fucking idiot.
You know?
It's like if you're a discus guy.
I know, but it's like, it's like.
You love the discuss.
I always talk about.
It's so fun.
Who's doing that on like Sunday?
You know what I mean?
No one.
Practicing the discus?
Who's like, oh, fuck.
That's what I'm saying.
All these sports that are basically just Olympic sports, if you don't get on the Olympics team, you're like, but I do.
I feel like paleo culture probably has spawned a resurgence of like annoying middle-class guy getting into discus.
Because he's like, oh, this is like my ancestors.
And he eats the, you know, it's like, oh, I'm on my carnivore OMAD diet.
Now I'm going to go discus throw.
They don't have discus and CrossFit, though.
If they did, that would be, that would be huge.
Yeah.
Throwing is cool.
That's one of the oldest things to do is to throw something.
Yeah, I know, but I'm like, I like running.
I'm not saying.
And jumping when I'm running.
I feel like you guys are understanding the point I'm making.
Running and jumping, those are like cool.
Those are good for you, whatever.
Like curling is like, that's a sport.
That's curling different.
That is a sport.
Curling is different.
And so I'm saying, but it's a notoriously.
It's a team sport.
It's a game sport.
It's a game.
It is a game.
A lot of these are just games.
Let's be real.
But I'm like, if you are doing that and you're like, I've been training for curl for four years and you don't make the Olympic curling team, how do you justify that to your wives?
Well, you got to work harder.
Yeah, but you like the human body is a fucking battery, Liz.
Like you run out of it.
You got to work harder.
You got to train better.
And next time, you got it.
There was a girl at my, like a chick at my boxing gym.
Replaced girl with chick.
There was a woman at my boxing gym.
Oh, yeah.
There was, yeah.
Hey, cool guy.
There was a female at my boxing gym.
I don't like that.
She almost made, interesting.
She almost made the Olympic team and then didn't.
But I was like, but she was like for boxing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, she was a fucking, she could hit.
But she had some, she's, she had a wingspan, too.
But she didn't.
But that's like a real sport.
Boxing?
Boxing.
You're thinking about this?
Yeah.
What do you mean?
Yeah, it's a real sport.
I have a hard time with sports that aren't team sports.
There's a whole team behind you, including guys like Brace.
It's like when you're like, oh, car racing is a sport.
I'm like, well, it's something.
You've watched that.
I mean, it's car racing.
I've watched it.
I don't know what that has to do with it, whether or not I think it's a sport.
Well, it's a sport.
That's a sport.
Racing is a sport.
Doesn't matter what the vehicle is.
Which I'm saying, they should let you race in other stuff, like fucking jets.
I guess it's a sport.
I just, it's not my kind of sport.
It's not basketball.
Or soccer.
Or soccer.
Yeah.
I like team sports.
I like, I like kind of, there's a, I don't know, we don't need to get into it.
It's just me and it's a much different kind of strategy and playing and, you know, game that's being fielded and the way that people work together.
That's what I enjoy.
Interesting.
And it becomes a kind of dance, you know, especially in the case of soccer, the most beautiful game.
You think it's a beautiful game?
I just like it.
It's not me that thinks that this is what it's called.
They call it that?
The beautiful game?
Because to me, I think the fans are more beautiful than the game.
I just love it.
I love seeing them.
I really, I think we should go to games together.
I think you would have a good time.
I would have a good time at a game.
Yeah.
Pull out a gun.
Get some attention.
No, we're definitely going to see the next next season.
Okay, I'll do that.
Yeah.
Book it.
Also, they're going to be great next.
Do people streak at basketball games?
Because that seems like it'd be the easiest thing.
I think that you should do that.
Because you're right there.
I think you should do it.
That's what I'm saying.
Like football, you got to get away.
Well, you got to pay the like four grand or whatever.
Whatever.
Say if you're a rich guy.
It's cheaper if you go to like a go to a small market team.
I bet it.
Do you know how?
It probably only costs like 800 bucks to streak at like a Charlotte Hornet.
What I'm saying is like, could you just, because you could probably avoid like a major league game like ban if you just started streaking at like minor league teams?
Sure.
And like, yeah, like work your way up.
Oh Streaker00:05:05
Yeah.
Because people, I mean, now they cut the cameras away.
I know.
But like, I feel like I could be, I feel like the juice that I would get from rocking my freaking thing down there.
I don't like that.
I feel like I could actually, by doing that, it would be like the combine and people would see how good of an athlete I am.
You get a new cool nickname, which would be the streaker.
No, I think that my nickname would be unfortunately much more insulting due to what I would be doing.
But I also like the, oh, it's the streaker.
Oh, it's the streaker.
The streaker is good.
Not a streaker, the streaker.
I think that.
It would be like kind of a Batman figure.
I frankly think that they would either call me Gigi Allen or Mishu.
And that is due to some.
Let's get to the episode.
So we actually talked for way too long and we need to cut the bullshit and talk about what we're talking about today.
Because we actually recorded this before and we are in the future recording the intro right now.
And we actually don't introduce the kind of series arc as we go into it.
So we should.
So we are talking about a small group that existed on in both the fringes and at certain points in the center of Bay Area radicalism throughout the 1970s called Tribal Thumb.
Yes, terrible name.
But in order to get there, we have to sort of set the scene for the ferment that fermented it.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I agree.
And draw some parallels by telling basically much of the story of a group called the SLA, the Simbines Liberation Army, in order to, which is also its connections to Tribal Thumb, in order to actually fully tell this story, which is one of, I think, of a type that I think that has, we've covered before on the show of a group with somewhat shady origins, shady purposes, and a shady,
I would say, flowering and eventual downfall.
Yes.
Now, this story takes place in the 70s, but because it's true and on and because we like to give everyone as much context as possible, we got to go all the way back to like basically, I'd say, when do we start?
Like mid-50s?
Yeah.
And talk about some of the lead up into this, which includes a history of black radicalism, a history of California prisons.
You know, you mentioned the SLA, but also the kind of federal involvement that was happening in terms of like, you know, COINTELPRO and informants and the fomenting of agitators in order to, I don't know, tarnish left-wing activism and specifically black radical activism throughout the 60s and then later on into the 70s.
So it's kind of a big story that is really, really fun to tell.
And we do go into a lot of history here, but I think it's a really great series of episodes.
We are joined by Matt and Matt from Left in the Bay, who I believe have launched a Patreon, which we'll link to in this, unless they took too long to do it.
But there'll be a link in the description of this episode.
And, yeah, I really like their work, and I'm glad to have them on the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
Why don't you, hey, everybody, just, you know, feel free to spread out throughout the store.
Put your hands in the bean jars, you know, or however they're the bins.
I haven't shopped.
Put your hands.
The bulk bins.
Put your hands in the bulk bins.
Don't be afraid.
Go grab a nut.
Go grab it.
Hey, get a nut off.
You know what I'm saying?
But hey, hey, hey, hey.
Everybody be cool.
We are going to smoke a little bit of leaf.
We're going to sit in a circle and we're going to hash this out like family.
And with us today to join our family are two white men named Matt.
We got Matt Ray, Matt Ranovix from Left in the Bay, as they call it, a proletarian history project, as I call it, a fascinating website, here to talk with us about, well, what the fuck are you here to talk with us about?
You want to?
Okay.
We're here to talk about a group called Tribal Thumb, also known as the Tribal Thumb Community, also known as The Thumb, also known as Well Springs Communion, and apparently also known as Well Springs Reunion at some point, who are sort of mysterious, highly suspicious, creepy, revolutionary organization, religious cult,
65 and the Great Migration00:05:22
criminal gang that shows up in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, gets involved in very suspicious ways with the radical prisoners movement, and in the process kills a few people and takes down a fledgling and pretty vibrant left-wing co-op network called the People's Food System.
I just also want to make clear here some credentials.
We have all three corners of the Bay represented on this.
No one here lived in the South Bay ever, right?
Hell no.
No, you guys did live in Santa Cruz.
There's only three corners.
South Bay is like a different Central Valley.
I'm sorry.
It is.
That's the north of it.
They keep trying to be more north and north as the years go on.
Exactly.
They're like, it's not that far.
And I'm like, come on, man.
I have a controversial, maybe perhaps geographical take on what constitutes the Bay.
If there's no Bay touching you, what part of the Bay Area are you from?
The Suisson Bay Area?
There's other bays in the Bay Area.
Perhaps you're part of one of those bays.
Like Half Moon Bay.
Half Blue Bay.
Half Moon Bay, San Pablo Bay, Swisson Bay, the Sacramento Canal system.
Delta.
There is Delta Bay.
Everyone remembers when they learned about what a Delta was in California education.
That's right.
And the salmon.
By learning that they're not from the bay.
Yes, exactly.
But we have to get into our hemp-covered time machine and actually go back a little bit, many decades, to talk about, but perhaps the origins of the prisoner movement, which will get us into tribal thumb.
So let's go back and let's head over to Watts.
What happens there?
Yeah, so there's a lot of background to kind of fill in to explain what the fuck is going on with tribal thumb.
And we're going to say probably too much of it.
But a good place to start is in 65.
We won't say too much about it, but the Watts Rebellion takes place in August of 65, shortly after Malcolm X is killed.
And it kind of inaugurates this new moment in like the black freedom struggle.
It becomes like what basically after that, what everyone understands a riot to be.
And many similar riots take place after that.
And there's a lot of reasons why Watts happens, including like in the like three years prior to Watts, I think it's like 65 people are killed by LAPD just in Watts alone.
And they, only one of those cases is like ends up being tried as a murderer.
Yeah.
And then, so yeah, on August 11th, this young black kid gets pulled over with his brother, gets arrested for drunk driving.
Basically, there's a struggle.
His mom is involved.
I think they're close to their house or something like that.
And then they all get arrested.
Their whole family gets arrested.
And basically six days of rioting ensues after that.
Thousands of people get arrested, like close to 150 people are killed.
Like thousands of National Guard are called in, etc.
So this happens in late 65.
About a year later, there's something that happens in San Francisco called the Hunters Point Uprising.
If I can interrupt for a second, I think what's important to note about Watts is that this really kind of marks a transition point.
I think as you said a second ago in the black freedom struggle, which earlier is more associated with this earlier moment of 1950s and early 60s civil rights movement in the South.
In the South at the time, as I'm sure everybody listening understands, black people were basically not even granted the full privileges of American citizenship in very basic ways.
And so the struggle in the South is really oriented around the question of citizenship and full citizenship.
And although the totally nonviolent nature of that movement is very overstated, there is this kind of like general commitment to strategic nonviolence in the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
And Watts really marks this moment where now the northern cities, the coastal cities are exploding and different sorts of political questions are on the table where it's not just about, you know, the rights of citizenship, but sort of more outwardly revolutionary kinds of ideas, kinds of rhetoric, kinds of modes of thinking are pushed to the front.
Yeah, I mean, from my very basic understanding of like the general contours of this stuff, I know that a lot of people who became involved in little, maybe more radical organizing in like the later 60s often had their start with like SNCC and stuff going to the south and funnily enough, almost like sort of completing the bourgeois revolution in the south, you know, like the Liberty Egality fraternity.
Well, I'm not sure that black people in the south and by 1968 had that, but you know, attempting to get those bourgeois rights and then returning to the north or to the west coast or to the Midwest and perhaps becoming involved in something a little more forward thinking.
Scandalous Ground Testing00:03:22
Right.
And there's also a whole generation of black people from the South who sort of moved to the West Coast during World War II as part of like the so-called Second Great Migration.
And these people are sort of sold to Bill of Goods, you know, as the people in the first great migration are as well, right?
Where they're kind of expecting things to be a hell of a lot better when they get to California.
And in some ways they are, but for the most part, they're not at all.
And they're treated terribly by just about every, you know, institution of power.
I think Hunters Point is a really good example of that, right?
You know, Hunters Point, where the riot we're about to talk about takes place, is a neighborhood in San Francisco that I would not hesitate, excuse me, I would go ahead and say that like most people who live in San Francisco, maybe moved to San Francisco, have never been to San Francisco.
Absolutely.
I was just going to say that.
It's like it's way out fucking on the outskirts of the city.
Half of it's fucking radioactive from the shipyard that was there, like the naval facility that was there.
Wasn't there a giant explosion there during World War II?
That was in like the Contra Costa County.
Okay, gotcha.
Yeah.
Unconquered naval.
Yes, that's what it was.
But it's very similar to Treasure Island, which is a real island in the bay, which was also like a lot of like barracks outposts.
Yeah, like low-income people that eventually lived there.
And made of trash.
Yeah.
And there's a trash trash, much like much of San Francisco, though.
More and more every day.
Also landfill.
But Hunters Point is super radioactive.
It's super, there's one road in, one road out.
I remember like, like as like a kid, because we always used to have these generator shows kind of near there.
Like it's really, you're like, wow, this is like a way to build a neighborhood that is completely fucking segregated from the rest of the city.
Developers have like, over the decades, have tried to like come in and basically failed, like over and over and over again, to like kind of develop up the area like in any way possible, except for and there was like in this last wave, if we want to call it that, since like 08 or whatever, whenever Google moved in.
That's what I always think of as like the start of it.
You know, a lot of people were trying to like buy these condos out there that were basically on radioactive land yeah, and spending like a shit ton of money because of San Francisco real estate mayor Willie Brown yeah, was our our, our San Francisco's former mayor, Kamala Harris's former, let's say, let's say boss, let's say boss that she had sex with.
I toured his office as a little kid on a field trip.
Really, I was in there yeah, and he he, he was involved in like setting up this like big, like living you know, sweetheart deal, giant condo thing that I think fell apart.
And there was also a big scandal in the Bay Area because the people that the I believe the city got to test the ground, it turns out, completely made up their results that said it wasn't radioactive.
Yeah, I mean, don't quote me on this.
I don't have this in front of me, but I remember all this playing out yeah, and then, much like the city college accreditation scandal, it turns out that the people doing the ratings had just completely made them up.
So anyways, the Hunter's Point 1966 and Hunters Point, you know becomes like a black neighborhood because it's close to the shipyard yeah, you know, and all these people moved to San Francisco or working working, you know.
Huey And The Panthers' Rise00:14:57
Well, they come out there to work in the war industries too yeah, so that's sort of like where they're sort of shunted off.
To begin with, like a lot of the black neighborhoods in the Bay Area have their roots in these kind of like war industries in World War II yeah, and there's all kinds of stuff about segregation, that like, and redlining and stuff that's like too much to get into right now, but that's also kind of at the heart of these rebellions.
But so yeah, in September 66 not dissimilar story from what happens in Watts on September 27th a black 17 year old, Matthew Peanut Johnson Jr.
Is basically chased in a car and murdered by a white SFPD officer, Alvin Johnson, in Hunters Point, and this sparks like five days of Rioting all across San Francisco, including like the Haight Ashbury is a huge spot, which is basically being transformed at that moment, but was a prominently black neighborhood.
Yeah.
And yeah, similar story.
National Guard come in, tons of people arrested.
A lot of people get really fucked up by the cops.
Yeah.
If you're sitting around on your computer and you have a second, you should look up this documentary, what's it called?
Take This Hammer.
Oh, yeah.
Which is a James Baldwin sort of like TV documentary where he goes around Hunters Point and a couple other black parts of the city right before the Hunters Point uprising and talks to just people on the street.
And so if you want to see like the sort of fabric of tension on the street and it's like even before Watts.
It's filmed in 64.
Yeah.
And he's touring around, but he goes to Hunters Point and talks to like black teenagers who are basically like, this is just like the South, except they're pretending it's not fucking racist.
Wait, what's the documentary called?
It's called Take This Hammer.
Take this Hammond.
It's really a remarkable film.
But yeah, a lot of just footage of basically black teenagers on the street in Hunters Point and the Western Edition just saying like, this is all bullshit and we're ready to tear it down.
And he has an extremely militant mood on the streets.
You know, it's funny.
I think people think of San Francisco as this like liberal, very liberal like, you know, town that's all woke or whatever, which I don't even think you could really go.
Yeah, the progressive city on the hill.
But despite its sort of bohemian reputation, maybe left over from the beat stuff from the 1950s, San Francisco as a whole, or not as a whole, but in large parts, was still very conservative, very Irish, like, which isn't necessarily always conservative.
Well, there's a very big Catholic portion of the city.
Yeah, like especially in the cops.
Yeah, its current reputation is certainly like, it's really dissimilar, especially in the early 1960s.
Yeah.
San Francisco's brand of racism and Californias in general is organic.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That's nicely put.
So two weeks after the uprising is when the Black Panther Party is formed.
Which again, we won't talk a lot about, but it's just important to introduce this group to the story.
It's, you know, for anyone who doesn't know about the Black Panther Party, I'm sure a lot of people have heard of it.
But it becomes like the preeminent black radical organization of the late 60s and is one of the most well-known black radical organizations in U.S. history.
They form out of Oakland in October 66, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, who are merit college students.
Which is a community college in North Oakland.
Which I know many people who went there.
Yeah.
It's to the hills.
It's been in the hills since the late 60s, but it's in the flatlands of North Oakland in this period.
Yeah, and they come out of this kind of like revolutionary reading group.
They're both involved in black radicalism, studying with this group at Merritt College.
But they, you know, they're influenced by Ram, the Revolutionary Action Movement, which is kind of this pioneering black maused organization that's formed pretty shortly before.
Yeah, they're out of Philly in a complicated way.
They claim to have sort of direct connections with Malcolm X prior to his assassination.
Yeah, so the Panthers kind of become this, you know, leading black militant organization in the Bay Area and then the country and in a sense, the world.
And the politics that kind of that they sort of help formulate in this moment is a kind of complex mix of the sort of kind of third world oriented revolutionary currents of the time and more sort of direct action oriented traditions that existed in the civil rights movement in the Bay Area, where they're sort of like directly organizing the community.
They start to like patrol, you know, police in Oakland and Richmond and other areas.
And they're from the jump explicitly in favor of guerrilla war.
And they are all about like being armed is like a central element of the Black Panther ideology.
That's sort of what separates them from the moment directly before them is they come out and they explicitly say like our intention is to overthrow the government through a guerrilla war.
And until then, we're going to build whatever we can until we get forced underground.
And that's how they come out from the jump.
Well, I mean, that's one of the big reasons that you can't open carry in California anymore is because when they went to the, there's very famous pictures of them at the California Statehouse in Sacramento.
Yeah.
And after that, it became basically, I think they literally explicitly just made it illegal right after that in order to carry on a rifle in public.
Yeah, so the statehouse protest is actually in response to this act that gets introduced to target the Black Panthers.
So there's already an act being introduced that says like we need to get rid of this open carry policy so these black people stop carrying guns.
And they go to the statehouse in force.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Walk past Ronald Reagan, who's talking to a group of school children on the grounds, go into the statehouse.
That's its own story that really we could get way too bogged down.
There's a lot to say about the Panthers, but we'll say just a couple more things.
And like someone who goes with them, basically their mentor, one of Huey and Bobby's mentors, this guy Mark Comfort.
He's not a super well-known figure, but is so influential in the history of Bay Area left kind of continuity from like the Communist Party to the Panthers and beyond.
It's his kind of outfit, which is just his swag and style that like the Black Panther Party copies.
Like he's wearing a black leather jacket and a black beret.
And the Panthers are like, that's sick as fuck.
We're going to start wearing that.
And he also gets Huey and Bobby their first guns.
He provides the guns that they get to go to Sacramento.
He goes with them also.
And there's too much to say on him now, but he was part of a group called ODAC, the Oakland Direct Action Committee, kind of militant civil rights organization.
And he was doing police patrols before the Panthers started.
So that's what kind of inspired the Panthers.
Like some of their first actions are following cops around with guns.
I think that's the main difference between Mark Comfort's police patrols and the Panthers, is that they're armed when they're doing them.
And that's kind of how they become quickly well-known.
You know, I want to mention too, and again, we don't need to get too bogged down on the Panthers, but I remember when this story broke, one of the people that they met in the early mid-60s at Merit was a guy, not a black guy, I think Japanese guy named Richard Aoki.
Yes.
Who was a pretty prominent left-wing guy in the Bay Area for a number of years, who I believe killed himself, I think in like the late 2000s.
And he turns out to have been a prolific FBI informant for a number of years, as was revealed in 2012.
And he was one of the sort of, this is how it was presented, reading about it.
He was one of the people that really gave them a lot of, like helped them acquire guns.
So this is a narrative I actually kind of want to push back against a little bit because Aoki, yeah, he's from what we know now, he is an informant from the jump.
Like he infiltrates at the behest of the authorities.
He infiltrates a Trotskyist organization before the Panthers.
And he meets Huey and Bobby kind of organically and then is there from the beginning of the Panthers.
But he only gives them like one or a couple guns.
And the reason he does that is because they're after guns.
Their politics is already about guns from the get-go.
And so he kind of, because he's getting in with them, gives them some.
Oh, no, yeah.
I wasn't saying that he's the one who got them into guns.
I'm saying that he helped them acquire some guns.
Yeah, totally.
Which I just think rhymes with a little bit of what happens with Tribal Thumb later and their own FBI arms instructors.
Although it's a little different situation.
Yeah, yeah.
The only reason I wanted to push back against that is because I do think there's a narrative that floats around that's like, oh, the FBI wanted the movement to get into guns.
Yeah.
And that was like their plan.
And I think it really is an organic thing that comes out of the movement itself.
What was the reaction to the development of the Panthers from the get-go in the Bay Area?
Well, for the first few months, they're a very small organization that just kind of like rolls around Oakland doing these.
They're like a neighborhood group, basically.
Everyone comes out of North Oakland and Emeryville.
The first initial members are all within like a 20-block radius of each other.
A lot of them are childhood friends.
Yeah.
And then they kind of blow up a little bit after there's this, this is really down the rabbit hole, but there's a police killing of a young black man in North Richmond, which is like north of the Oakland area.
And they kind of organize people over there around this killing and start holding these big armed rallies in North Richmond.
And they kind of like gradually grow that way.
But it's really the Sacramento protest action after this law is introduced to disarm them.
They go to Sacramento with guns and it's an international news event.
It explodes.
And they just like all of a sudden are rocketed into this like incredible fame and celebrity.
And like Panther chapters start sprouting up all over the place that have no connection to them directly.
People are just like, well, I'm a Panther too.
You know what I mean?
Fuck yeah, like I'm doing that.
And then by late 67 into 68, they're really kind of like the hegemonic force on the left of like the new left.
It's a very short time period.
So it's like within like a year, they're super famous.
Yeah.
Do you want to talk about Eldridge Cleaver?
Yeah, yeah.
We keep saying we gotta get out.
We keep saying we gotta get out of the Panther stuff.
We're almost there.
This is all really important to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So while the founders of the Black Panther Party are, you know, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, very quickly their most prominent spokesman and figurehead is this guy Eldridge Cleaver, who is an extremely complicated and fascinating dude.
Oh, yeah.
Who is basically he was a prisoner in the California prison system.
He got moved all over the place.
He was in basically a number of prisons that show up in this story later.
He was doing time.
He was a petty criminal from Southern California doing time for armed robbery and rape and other burglary things like that.
In prison, he's a sort of like organic intellectual of the proletariat.
He kind of like gets introduced to Mao and Marx and Fanon and reads extremely heavily and voraciously and starts writing, even though at the first he has no one to write to.
He just begins writing.
He's an extremely gifted writer and sharp thinker with an extremely sharp tongue.
He gets hooked up with this radical lawyer who he sort of hears about by chance named Beverly Axelrod, who's a white woman in the Bay Area.
She agrees to become his lawyer, and they start exchanging letters.
She basically helps him smuggle his essays out of prison.
I think he's in Folsom at the time, but I could be getting that a little bit mistaken.
And she hooks him up with Ramparts magazine, who start publishing, who's this, we could talk about Ramparts all fucking day if we wanted to.
They start publishing his essays, and he kind of becomes this sort of like, almost like Jean-Genet in France.
He becomes this kind of like incarcerated intellectual celebrity while he's still in jail.
Underground phenomenon.
Yeah.
Him and Beverly Axelrod as lawyer become lovers, which is a dynamic that you will see over and over again in the prison movement where these like extremely charismatic, incarcerated political men and their generally white radical lawyer, female radical lawyers become lovers.
It happens over and over again in this story.
But Cleaver eventually gets out in 66 and Lynx tries to reform in some way.
Well, he's working as a journalist for Ramparts and he's interested in reforming the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which is Malcolm X's political organization that he formed shortly before he was killed.
And in that process, he is working with another group that's setting up a memorial to Matthew Peanut Johnson, the young guy who was killed and sparked the Hunters Point uprising.
That group brings in Malcolm X's widow, which is like, I think her first public appearance since the assassination of Malcolm X, and wants an armed phalanx to guard her as she comes into the airport.
And this is kind of the Black Panther Party's first big public outing.
There aren't actually any photos of it as far as I know.
Yeah.
And they're extremely courageous.
They like blow past the police at the airport and they're just like, fuck you.
Like, we're allowed to open carry.
We're allowed to keep this woman safe.
And they take her down to the Ramparts office where there's this crazy standoff between the police and the Panthers.
And the police, I mean, the details aren't important, but the cops tell the Panthers, disarm, put your guns down.
Panthers are pointing their guns at them.
It's like a standoff.
San Quentin's Prisoners Movement00:15:05
And Huey Newton says, no, we have a right to do this.
You're infringing on our rights.
And he's quoting the law at them directly.
And the cops don't know what to do.
There's reporters everywhere and they stand down.
And Eldridge Cleaver sees this and he's like, okay, I'm in this group.
And very quickly becomes like the most prominent spokesman of the Black Panther Party.
And so it's important to set him up, first of all, just because he's an important figure in this movement, but also so that people have a sense that there's this kind of inside-outside relationship between the radical black movement in the Bay Area and in general and this kind of like intellectual radical movement that's going on in the prisons.
Yeah.
Which Eldridge Cleaver sort of comes out of.
Can we talk a little bit about the prison system?
Not the prison system in some like, but specifically in the in California and what's going on in the prisons in San Quentin, in Folsom, in Vacaville, like, and this kind of network that comes out of it, because I think that's important for people who aren't familiar with some of this history to kind of like maybe play the land a little bit.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, so like there's the really kind of prominent prisons that play a part in the stories that we'll be telling are like San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad.
There's another place that we'll talk about quite a bit called the Vacaville or California Medical Facility, which will become very important to the story.
But so all these prisons like are on the one hand where these kind of organic kind of black radical intellectual movements are taking place in large part in conversation with what's happening outside.
But there's so much movement in between and outside.
So there's this kind of back and forth relationship between how these developments are taking place or whatever.
Some people are being politicized in prison where they're at from a really young age and then coming out and joining political movements or they're joining them in prison forming organizations.
But I think it's important to talk about how just horrific California prisons are at this time.
And again, this is like the reason why some of the context of Watts and the Hunters Point uprising and this kind of development in black radical political traditions in the mid-60s,
why that's important is like the prisons are being flooded with young black men who are just like arrested in this riot or like you know in the case of famously George Jackson who we'll tell the whole story of he's arrested as an 18 year old for stealing $70 from a convenience store.
And at the time, I believe this is still the case in a number of states, although I was going to say don't quote me on that, but I'm on a recording.
We do that all the time.
So I'm quoting myself.
Stated works.
Okay, great.
They have a policy of indeterminate sentencing, which is used basically all the time, where a guy like George Jackson, you know, literally like a teenager, can steal, commit some petty crime and be given like one year to forever.
And it's basically up to the parole officers who are assigned to the person to determine when they're fit to re-enter society.
And so, you know, some people get out in a timely fashion, but if you're politically engaged in some way or if they don't like you for some other reason, or if you're just unlucky, a lot of people end up languishing in like what are de facto life sentences for very minimal offenses.
Yeah.
And the Department of Corrections, I mean, wields like an crazy amount of power with all of this, like in within the prisons.
Like, like you said, they can just decide, you know, how long these kids are going to be in.
And nothing's really on the books in any sort of, you know, any kind of sense of justice, as anyone would think of it.
Right.
And once you're in, like, these guards are like fucking with the prisoners all the time, like setting them up for shit, like pitting white supremacist gangs against these like nascent kind of black radical organizations.
So once you're in, it's so easy like for some shit to go down.
And then they're like, well, you got to do fucking seven more years.
Yeah.
The guards are openly racist in a way that like prison, the conditions in prisons now are horrific, as I'm sure we all know.
But at the time, the kind of like open racism of prison guards is like really shocking to a contemporary reader.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like these prisons kind of become known amongst this milieu as like California's concentration camps and become endlessly referred to that way.
But yeah, let's talk a little bit about San Quentin.
We could start there.
I think we'll want to talk about Folsom is another prison that I forgot to mention earlier, which plays a big part of the story.
San Quentin is a prison.
It's very famous because of the name.
I think people know it.
And it's also like, it's unlike a lot of prisons in California, which are in more rural areas.
San Quentin is on the bay.
It's got primo races.
Way more than the South Bay.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's directly on the bay.
You can see Alcatraz.
People obviously, I feel like everyone knows, like, oh, he's in San Quentin.
It's always like, oh, that's the scary guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we interviewed a woman whose husband was in San Quentin.
Of course.
Yeah.
I mean, literally for like over 100 years, it's this infamous prison, which like even back in the 20s was like all these radicals are like hold up there.
Yeah.
And there's a long tradition of kind of like radical milieus coming out of San Quentin or being holed up in San Quentin.
There's like an IWW strike there in like 1918 or something.
Oh yeah.
No idea.
Yeah.
In the jute mill in San Quentin.
There's also Edward Bunker, the great California crime writer, was incarcerated there.
Oh yeah.
Tom Mooney was locked up there after this bombing.
Anyways, there's a lot of shit to say about it.
But we'll start and like, we'll kind of pick up the story and talk about 67, 68.
Yeah, and what's important about this moment we're going to talk about in 67, 68 in San Quentin is that this is really where the prisoners movement begins to kind of cohere as a movement rather than just like there's a bunch of radical elements doing kind of covert stuff in the prisons.
A kind of like organized prisoners movement sort of emerges in San Quentin in 6768.
Yeah.
There's like a couple like really interesting incidents I think that we'll want to cover.
So in January 67, there's a quote unquote race riot that breaks out in the yard of San Quentin, which a lot of inmates say was basically put together by the guards.
What kind of is going on in this period from like in the late 60s, early 70s is often like, you know, as a kind of punishment for misbehavior or whatever, guards will like close off the yard to all prisoners.
Obviously this still, this kind of shit goes on all the time.
But in this period, they kind of typically close off the yard, let like tension simmer between like the big prominent white supremacist gang at this time is the Aryan Brotherhood, which is in all these prisons.
We've covered the Aryan Brotherhood's activities in California prisons before, but related to perhaps a different act of violence involving a dog in San Francisco.
That's our favorite story.
I want to hear about that.
Oh, come on, the Dodge Techs?
Yeah.
I don't know this story.
Oh, with the Nazi Dodgex?
I don't know the story at all.
With the lesbians.
What?
Well, he sounds way more.
He's like, I'm not going to have sex with the Jewish lawyer.
I know.
Both thoughts.
Oh, you got to listen to the episode.
But he killed the lesbian.
Yeah, the dog killed the lesbian.
The dog killed the lesbian.
I'm going to go out in the hall and listen to that episode real fast.
Yeah.
But so basically, like, all these incidents are taking place where, like, they'll release everyone into the yard all of a sudden and like instantly brawls are taking place.
Gotcha.
So they'll keep them like hot boxed in the cells.
The San Quentin cells, too.
Like, are it is old fucking prison.
It's a little, they've tried to reform it now.
Like, and now it's, I think, like, kind of like a model prison kind of thing.
But, like, it's old prison, small cells.
Yeah.
Your tensions are hot.
It's hot in there.
And then, like, they keep you boxed up, they put you out in the yard.
And you're fine.
So this goes down in January 67.
And by June, this publication starts to come out of the prison movement, specifically, we think, at San Quentin called The Outlaw.
It's produced by prisoners.
Yeah.
All the writing is done by prisoners.
It's basically smuggled out.
They have help from these kind of Berkeley radicals that are part of this underground newspaper called the Berkeley Barb that help them print the underground newspaper.
So it's like the writing is smuggled out, it's printed outside of the prisons, and then issues are like smuggled back in and distributed, you know, within and outside of the prison.
And it's a mixture of like outwardly political stuff with like this guard's gay with that guard.
Yeah.
A little bit of gossip, and then you get to like seed all the actual like revolutionary stuff.
Yeah, that's why we're always talking about like Filler and Botox and who looks freaky.
And the dog sex.
And so I forget how many issues come out like in that first six months or whatever.
But pretty quickly, there's calls for a strike to take place at San Quentin in February the following year.
So February 68.
And that happens.
On February 15th, inmates in San Quentin go on strike, calling it the convict unity holiday, which is this really crazy event.
The Grateful Dead plays a concert for like over 500 people outside of San Quentin.
Where?
Because there's just the highway and then the gun.
Maybe they didn't have the gun range there.
Well, you've seen the picture.
I don't exactly.
They're like up against the wall, kind of.
Oh, there is.
It's weird.
So like San Quentin and like anyone who's driven on the highway, because it's like right before the Richmond Bridge.
It's like there's this weird gated community for the guards.
Yeah.
It's like suburban looking community.
There's a gun range across the street where a cop, or I think it's only for the prison guards, shot a gun once and a bullet went over the hill and killed someone driving on the highway on the other side.
I think like 15 years ago.
And so I'm like, yeah, I guess there is like places around there.
There's like, because it's near the ferry terminal.
Yeah, I don't know specifically where they go, but like they comes over.
Yeah, and they and they send balloons over the wall with like messages of support.
They do these big like chalk drawings outside with peace signs.
Dancing bears.
Yeah, exactly.
I will say, I hate the Grateful Dead, but if you are a rock music fan and interested in San Quentin, I implore you, please look up the footage of crime playing there in 1976.
Oh, hell yeah.
Because it's the fucking coolest concert footage of all time.
And the dead, like, you know, for what it's worth, they play out a lot of like Panther benefits around the same time.
Like, they're kind of doing this radical tour.
But yeah, the Peace and Freedom Party, which is another group we shouldn't talk too much about, but kind of this like progressive, hippie, weird party that's connected to the Panthers already at this point.
In 68, they run Eldridge Cleaver for president.
Yep.
Which is pretty cool.
With Jerry Rubin as his running guy, which is on a whole other case.
Two beatable tickets.
It's so funny because 20 years later, Jerry Rubin would be like a shoeless, like Swami stock trader, and Eldredge Cleaver would be making fucking cockholster pants and then like joining the moonies.
So both of these guys would be like literally like memorizing which way Western man.
Not even which way.
They would go like they would make like a weird circle and both essentially become like modern Republicans.
Frank Republicans, but Republicans nonetheless.
Cleaver does join the GOP.
He does.
His small business is so nice.
Cleaver, I believe, speaks at a GOP convention at one point, or maybe California GOP convention.
Classical conversion.
Yeah, there's a video on YouTube that's pretty remarkable.
Also, at the end of his life, he has a stand at the Ashby flea market by Ashby Bart selling American flags and other really depressing items.
So kind of the only place.
I hate that bar station.
Yeah, I don't like that bar station either.
I really don't like that Ashby Barstation.
I also don't like that bar station because at one point I used to close the bathrooms there permanently.
I'll just say that.
But also, that was kind of the only place where you'd see a lot of Jamaicans in the bay in one place.
It was all Jamaican.
That's true.
Yeah, that's true.
They had a great drum circle.
Yeah.
Well, great as a subjective, but they had a drum circle.
They're all great.
So this strike goes on in February.
The prison strike.
The prison strike.
Yeah.
And then it spreads.
There's like a solidarity strike that happens at Folsom.
The strike demands are all kind of like reform-oriented.
There's the conditions in the prison.
Yeah.
It goes on for like a week, about a week, but by the 20th of February, both San Quentin and Folsom are on like total lockdown.
And there's like they basically finish like a work stoppage.
And there's a funny quote by San Quentin's associate warden that he says we were a victim.
We were victimized.
It says the prison was a victim of a new type of insurrection involving a coalition of prisoners and the new left.
And then it's kind of there's other stuff I think we want to say about the strikes that kind of continue to happen at San Quentin and Folsom in the coming years, but it might be a good point to talk because everything that happens in the following like two years is really heavily tied to the story of George Jackson.
Yeah.
Yeah, very important figure who we haven't really talked extensively about, though.
We've talked in passing about him.
Yeah, he's been mentioned in a few episodes, but I would say he's probably one of the more famous American prisoners of the 20th century.
Yeah.
Founder of the Black Gorilla Family, which I got really into reading about the modern incarnation of, because the Black Gorilla family is still around.
Nolan's Legacy: Solitary Confinement00:14:34
It's like a huge prison.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah.
But there's this split in the Black Gorilla family as of now, which I read a bunch about, not even for the show.
Just it was weird.
Or it was just a weird thing I was looking at.
Where there's people who are like on the entrepreneur money-making mindset, and then there's people who are like more political, but it's like political in a weird way.
But it strayed pretty far from its roots.
Also, kind of a classic split.
Yeah, yeah, kind of classic split.
But he was one of the Solodad brothers.
Yes.
So I think we should tell that story a little bit just to get because that becomes super important.
Do you want to say anything else about San Quentin before we do that?
Well, I think the one thing that really needs hammering home just to get a sense of like the development of the prisoners movement is that when the 68 convict unity holiday happens at San Quentin, it doesn't call itself a strike.
They're not talking in terms of labor or connecting it to the labor movement.
And they're not making any explicitly political demands.
There's no kind of like outwardly revolutionary rhetoric in the demands put out by the prisoners, the convict unity holiday.
And this is 68.
By the end of 1970 and into 71, that's going to be a completely different situation.
Where the demands that are coming out of the prisoners movement are going to be explicitly political, explicitly revolutionary, and they're going to be tying themselves more directly to the question of like labor and value production and things of this that kind of nature.
Well, let's talk about how that shift happens.
Yeah, George Jackson is an important figure.
Yeah, that kind of tells a story of what changes in that time.
So again, just really quick, George Jackson, 1960, he's 18.
He gets arrested.
He's kind of running around before that doing little petty crimes, you know, and he gets arrested for stealing $70 worth of shit from a convenience store in LA where he was from.
And again, is given an indeterminate sentence of one year to life in prison.
He spends the rest of his life in prison.
He's initially sent to Soledad and he's transferred around a bunch of times in a way that's hard to keep track of.
And this kind of happens a lot where people are moved around, transferred from San Quentin to Soledad, from Soledad to Folsom.
It adds a very confusing dimension to the story, but we won't try to map that out here.
But very quickly, he becomes, like Eldritch Cleaver, like this kind of organic prison intellectual.
There's a good quote from him.
Yeah, he meets a bunch of people right off the bat.
This guy W.L. Nolan, who becomes kind of his mentor and introduces Fanon to him.
He meets this guy, James Carr, and they form a gang called the Wolfpack, which happens before the Black Gorilla family.
And it's unclear exactly what the timeline is of the Black Gorilla family.
And some people claim that George Jackson wasn't actually a founding member of it.
It's definitely important to the Black Gorilla family that they say that he was.
Yeah, his story is like the essence of their kind of thing.
But so, yeah, and then he spends a lot of time at San Quentin where he says, I met Marx, Lennon, Trotsky, Angles, and Mao, and they redeemed me.
So he, again, is kind of a voracious reader.
He's studying all this shit.
He spends like in his first eight years in prison, seven and a half of them in solitary confinement.
So he's super isolated.
When he does have time, he's kind of, yeah, mingling with these people, James Carr, Nolan, Bill Christmas, these other people that come become like central to the kind of organizing scene in prison.
And in January of 69, so this is like eight and a half years into his sentence, both he and W.L. Nolan are transferred to Soledad.
There's some mention of this kind of radical reading group that's taking place at Soledad, and it seems like Jackson and Nolan are part of it.
Nolan in particular becomes kind of like a huge target of the prison guards because he's really instrumental in organizing prisoners around the death of these two prisoners that happened within that first year that they're there.
This guy, Clarence Cossey and William Powell.
These are just like two people killed by white guards.
So they're there for this first year.
They're doing some organizing, they're doing some reading.
And then this incident happens on January 13th, 1970, where basically, again, situation where the yard has been closed for a long time and guards let everyone into the yard.
All of a sudden, when they know there's kind of beef between Aryan Brotherhood and certain black inmates, there's immediately a brawl.
And really quickly, this guard from a prison tower 30 feet up shoots and kills three black inmates, including them clearly directly.
Because the people shot are W.L. Nolan, Jackson's mentor, Cleveland Edwards, another well-known black radical, and this guy Alvin Miller, who is not a well-known black radical, but who looks almost identical by many accounts to a guy named Earl Thatcher, who's going to come up later in our story in a big way, Who at the time, and we'll get into this later, is the leading ranking Black Panther Party member in Soledad prison.
Thatcher is?
Thatcher is the ranking Black Panther Party member in Soledad prison in this period.
And it's widely believed, and he's on the yard for this incident.
Yeah.
Widely believed within the movement.
And it published as such at the time, including in Angela Davis's book that comes out in 71, that Alvin Miller, who was killed in the Soledad incident, sniped by the cops or by the prison guards, is a case of mistaken identity and they wanted to kill Earl Satcher.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
It's fucking crazy.
It's really not.
Yeah.
People will understand why that's crazy when they hear the rest of where this story is going, but just trust and remember that little detail because that's fucking crazy.
Yeah.
So this is the incident that produces the Soledad Brothers because basically there's like a grand jury that's convened.
This guy, Miller, OB Miller, whatever the fuck, is like found not guilty.
This is the killer.
This is the prison guard.
The guy who should be the prison guard.
He's exonerated.
And then basically it's like this, the grand jury or whatever is apparently on the radio in Soledad.
So inmates are hearing what's going on.
And within like 30 minutes, another white prison guard is found dead in a cell.
This guy, John V. Mills.
And there's slogans going around the prison, like written on shit that say like one down, two to go.
Yeah.
So it's very clear there's an effort that's like, you kill three of us, we're going to kill three of us.
Rutalitori.
Yeah.
Strike.
Yeah.
And then George Jackson and two others, Fleeta Drungo and John Clutchette.
I've always said clutchette, but I don't actually know.
I don't know.
I think it's clutchet.
Someone out there knows and is furious with us for doing that.
They get tried with the murder of this guard.
So they're accused of the murder of this guard.
They become the Soledad Brothers.
On relatively scant evidence, it should be said.
Whether or not they did it, I personally don't care.
But it's by no means an open and show case.
Yeah.
And they become this cause celeb in the left.
Sure.
Basically immediately.
There's a defense committee put together around them.
And, you know, they become quite famous as a result of this incident.
Yeah.
And then Jackson has moved back to San Quentin, where he spends the remainder of his life.
There's a lot of other shit going on at Soledad, kind of in the aftermath of this.
There's a group known as the Soledad 7.
I don't know that we need to talk about the Soledad.
There's a whole other shit.
There's all this other shit going on.
Another prison guard gets killed.
More guys get railroaded on it.
They're all members of this black radical reading group.
They all get off because there's no evidence.
Yeah.
But the other really important story in the kind of developments with George Jackson is that later in 1970, in August, His younger brother, Jonathan Jackson, who's 17 years old at the time,
storms the Marin County Hall of Justice with multiple guns during like a trial of this other prisoner and takes the judge and the DA and several jurors hostage, gives guns to some of the witnesses.
Some of them take them and help them.
They take these hostages and try to flee and ultimately negotiate their release for the exchange of the Soledad Brothers.
But Jonathan Jackson is killed.
The judge is killed.
Oh, yeah, because the judge has a, and actually I had this, because it's a very famous photograph, and I used it in a punk flyer.
I was like 16 years old.
Well, I used like a close, like I like Xerox to be close up of just the shotgun to the cop's head, like the judge's head.
But he duct taped a shotgun, like the barrel to the judge's head, which is a pretty good, you know, you're taking a guy hostage.
Yeah.
The gun's in your head, no matter what.
Right.
And because of that, the judge obviously gets his fucking, his pimple popped.
Yeah.
In a big way.
In a big way.
Well, the guns, it should be noted too, also famously belonged to Angela Davis, which you might know as being like a famous Democratic Party activist in George Johnson.
But they belong to her, and she sort of, her political career really takes off after that, you might say.
She becomes a fugitive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I hear she's into shihi tzu dogs.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, but that is a Democrat thrown through.
So that's this other kind of like big incident of the story, which there's other stuff to say about that later.
There's kind of a guerrilla group that comes out and names themselves after the August 7th moment.
But basically, and it's shortly after that that George Jackson's book of prison letters, Solodad Brothers, is published.
It's like a month later or something.
And this kind of becomes like a best-selling book and introduces his name to tons of people and become, paints a pretty sympathetic picture of him because he's like writing all these letters, many to his brother, who was slain, many to his parents.
It's a lot of fun.
From Solitary Confinement.
Yeah.
So do you want to talk about that?
And it's a beautiful book, too.
Like everyone should read Soledad.
Solodad Brothers.
If you haven't read it, you should go pick it up.
Yeah, and some of the descriptions of just like, first of all, it's just gorgeous writing.
But it's also the descriptions of life in solitary confinement are some of the most haunting things you'll ever read.
Right.
of stuff about like the sound is just screaming in the distance because you can hear people getting beaten by guards but also people just scream because there's nothing else to do and so he's just sitting there in the cell by himself trying to read and write and do push-ups and there's just intermittent screaming muffled in the background and this is for years this is his life for years you know anyway um yeah so at what right after the August 7th,
1970 Marin County courthouse incident where Jonathan Jackson storms the courthouse and there's this bloodbath shootout, there's a prison strike at San Quentin.
This is later that month.
It's August 24th.
So just a couple weeks after.
And the specific things leading up to it are really not that worth getting into.
What's important to note about the San Quentin prison strike that happens in August 1970 is that it marks a shift in the rhetoric of the prison movement.
Now they're explicitly talking about unionizing.
They're explicitly talking about their role kind of in the sort of capitalist enterprises that the prison is running.
I know there's all kinds of debates in anti-prison circles about like, do prisons turn profits and all this shit.
I don't want to get into that, but this is an early moment for where prisoners are really starting to think about that.
There's all kinds of like manufacturing being done at San Quentin of like clothing, furniture, canned goods, all kinds of stuff.
I want to say to our to our foreign listeners, people who might live outside the U.S., where you're, especially those who are in Europe, where you get a PlayStation 3, 4, perhaps even 5 in your prison cell.
In America, you can get a job in prison, but you get paid like even to this day, like 35 fucking cents an hour.
Like it's, you know, and that's the famously the thing they talk about is the 14th Amendment, like, you know, abolishing slavery except for prisons.
Like, you know, you can, like, you work.
I have no idea.
They were probably getting paid one cent an hour back then.
If anything.
I think was what they were getting.
But like, you know, you get paid slave wages in prison.
Well, slave wages.
I guess slaves don't have wages.
But you get paid like nothing in prison.
And in America to make, and lots of things.
License plates, most famously.
Right.
A lot of American flags.
American flags.
I didn't know that.
That's so fucked up.
Like poetically so fucked up.
So that's one element, right?
Is that they put out this big statement that says, help us hit them where it hurts in their pockets, which is like, you know, it's very, just like kind of classic unionism, labor unionism.
But their demands list that they put out is written by a Black Panther named Warren Wells, who's actually in prison stemming from charges that came from this April 6th, 1968 shootout that little Bobby Hutton was killed in, which I think we mentioned earlier, or maybe that was before we were recording.
I can't remember now.
Linking Struggles Globally00:02:54
That's its own story.
But the first demand on the list of the strike is one, free all political prisoners.
Number two is free the Soledad brothers.
And the last and ninth point on the demands list is apply the provisions of the Geneva Convention to blacks and other American political prisoners.
All men presently committed to condemned Roe awaiting state execution should immediately be granted asylum in those countries under the flag of Africa, Asia, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and other points of the world where the American revolutionaries have established a free world solidarity pact.
So this is interesting because it is very, I mean, as we see, especially throughout the 1970s, this is like an explicit linking of these political struggles in America, especially with like the black minority.
But then to another extent, also, especially in the Bay Area, the Asian minorities and throughout the country, Latinos as well, linking their struggle as like these colonized nations within a nation, right?
And so linking like the struggle of the black movement in America as like another front in this third world war, which also just sort of translates into this like the embryonic kind of Maoism that is that is forming.
It's around this time too that the Black Panther Party kind of talks about this conception of the internal colony.
Yeah.
Saying that kind of black Americans are an internal colony in the States.
Yeah, and I mean, this goes back to, you know, back to even like 1920s, 1930s with Stalin's formulation of stuff of the black belt as like a separate nation within the US.
Which isn't necessarily the most theoretically sound thing in the world in the way that it was formulated back in the 1930s.
But it's taken up by like black communists in the 30s, black American communists in the 30s.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
And what's important too about the black belt thesis, the idea of this like internal black colony in America, is like whether or not the specifics are that sound.
Yeah, his geography does.
Yeah, what it does is it connects the black struggle against racism in America directly to imperialism and colonization in the rest of the world, which is like a pretty major theoretical leap that is quite sound.
Yeah.
You know, and that really affects the way that black people and people of color in general in this moment start to think about their role in the struggle as like not just being not struggling for civil rights per se, but as being part of like a revolutionary rupture that's going to overthrow Western imperialism and capitalism in the world as such.
Because you got to remember too, 1970, like we are at like peak of like the non-aligned movement, for instance, like getting a popularity of Cuba, of like all of these things that like are seen by many in American and understandably rightfully so as like as the as the countryside surrounding the city.
And like these internal these internal colonies in America are in revolt throughout much of these years.
Union of Prisoners?00:13:16
Yeah.
And so, yeah, this is really important because it also just, once we get more through the 1970s, this Maoist third worldist kind of ideology really becomes front and center.
Right.
And for better and for worse in some cases.
Right.
Yeah, this is just like a global revolutionary period that is like really hard, I think, to imagine ourselves in the place of right now.
But this was like, there was a really genuine sense that like revolution is coming to the United States.
And it almost did.
Yeah, it kind of almost did.
Well, I'm going to push back on that.
People try to do some things, but I don't know if they would have won.
That's really something we don't need to try to figure out right now.
So, okay, so there's the strike at San Quentin.
It's not successful.
It doesn't get any of its either reform demands or obviously it's like hardcore political demands, but there is a degree of violence.
The strikers are tear gassed.
They in turn smash up a bunch of shit.
They break toilets, wash basins, they rip up beds, but nobody is actually like beaten or killed.
It's kind of like a weird standoff.
And then they send four of the key organizers to separate them supposedly from people at San Quentin, they send them to Folsom.
Then two months later, there's a gigantic strike in Folsom.
Very famous.
Yeah, and this is like, this is a huge moment.
And, you know, without getting too deep into the specifics of the Folsom strike, what's important to know about it, among other things, is that an organization kind of forms out of the Folsom prison strike in late 1970 called at first the California Prisoners Union.
It's later going to be called the United Prisoners Union.
The California Prisoners Union sort of like emerges, announces that there's going to be this strike.
It's sort of unclear what the union is, like to what extent it's actually like a union of prisoners inside and to what extent it's kind of like radical lawyers on the outside issuing statements.
I think the evidence suggests it's kind of both in a complex and confusing way.
Yeah, there's often like, I mean, you mentioned before about people sleeping with their radical lawyers, but like also radical lawyers' involvement in like the prison movement too should not be understated.
Like there are a lot of, listen, to me, lawyers are like sharks, right?
Although we do often advertise for personal injury attorneys on this podcast, I will say not generally a huge fan except for our lawyers, of which we have many.
But that's also why we're so scared of them.
We're so scared of them.
But lawyers, lawyers' sort of connections to these prison movements definitely should not be understated.
Yeah, absolutely.
And actually, you know, to that point, I got to meet Lennox Hines a couple of months ago in Belgium.
No shit.
Yeah.
So there's a list of demands that's put out of the Folsom strike, which is considerably longer than the nine-point demand list that came out of San Quentin.
It's 31 points.
It's produced by a prisoner who works in the printing press in the prison, which I guess there is one, which is interesting.
Like I said, it's extraordinarily long, and it also is a mixture of these reform demands about changing prison structures, about prison food, all kinds of stuff.
And then also very explicitly political and revolutionary demands and reiterating this demand that radical prisoners, that political prisoners, which to their mind is like any prisoner in the system who holds sort of radical views because they're de facto being punished at a greater rate and in different ways for holding those views, should be granted political asylum and sent to a third world country or to the Soviet Union.
So that's now part of the movement.
The story goes that some of the lawyers on the outside who are running or part of running the CPU are considerably more moderate and they're kind of freaked out by the inclusion of these demands and they try really hard to get the prisoners to drop, say, like freedom for the Soledad brothers as one of their key demands.
But by this time, the demand list has already leaked.
It's already in the press.
And so there's a conflict brewing basically from the get-go in the California Prisoners Union between these more moderate elements who are whiter and more on the outside, who don't want the union to engage in kind of like revolutionary struggle and want it to kind of become a bargaining agent for inmates in California state prisons.
And then this other side that's supported by a lot of like other white radicals on the outside, but is more connected to like black ex-cons that's saying, no, this is a key constituent part of a revolutionary movement that's happening right now.
And prisoners are going to be the vanguard of this revolutionary struggle in America.
They're the most oppressed people in America.
They have the, you know, the greatest, from their vantage point, they can see through the bullshit and their various experiences in defying the state and in dealing with the state repression positions them to be able to deal with what's coming down the pike when the revolution kicks off.
So speaking of what's coming down the pike, I want to actually talk about the sort of theoretical framework of what you just said for a second.
Because I think one of the more, I would say, controversial or like theoretically maybe controversial aspects of like a lot of like Black Panther and Black Panther related things was the primacy often of the lumpen proletariat, right?
Of the of the like the lower classes in political organizing.
And Marx famously had some rather unkind words for members of the lumpen proletariat based upon historical experiences, especially in France, right?
And in the 1960s, 1970s, there was a big thing that is a very famous part of the new left, which is where you saw a lot of middle-class, white, oftentimes upper-middle-class radicals sort of become have this sort of fetishistic view of the black prisoner, right?
As the vanguard of this organization and this really like weird relationship with, I mean, there's just kind of no other way to put it, this sort of weird relationship with it.
And it's interesting because it's a complicated thing.
Because on one level, this is correct, right?
Like there was a like, I would say the main, the main portion of organic intellectuals that were coming out of the of the, I don't know, of America at this point were oftentimes black prisoners or black members of the lumpen proletariat.
However, a lot of middle class, upper middle class, bourgeois, like white radicals had a difficulty sifting through the bullshit, right?
Because it is often, and you know, you see this with its sort of farcical replays of like modern iterations of this stuff.
They don't understand.
Like they don't have, they don't have like a very basic level of like street smart to like understand whether someone is a is means what they're saying or like whether somebody is a fucking con.
And like, I mean, con in the way that they're conning you into something.
And that plays out very prominently both in the story that we're telling today and in a story kind of adjacent to that, which is the story of the SLA.
Well, I was going to say, if we want to talk about like white middle class psychosexual hang-ups on an idealized revolutionary subject, like we got to talk about Pettyhurst.
No doubt about that.
Yeah, to that effect, I actually brought in a quotation from this kind of remarkable essay that's published in the Berkeley Barb in 1968 by this dude Stu Albert, who's a leader in what becomes the Yippies and other sort of like Berkeley radical stuff.
That's all about how John Dillinger was the ultimate revolutionary.
He says here, John Dillinger was the first white panther.
We can learn a lot from the Dillinger gang's tactics.
They supplied themselves with bulletproof vests and machine guns by breaking into police stations and putting the pigs against the wall.
We must all become like Dillinger.
And then I got this other quotation here from the National Lawyers Guild in 1972, who we all know and love, the guys with the green hats at the protests.
Prisoners are the revolutionary vanguard of our struggle.
When prisoners come out, they will lead us in the streets.
So that's, yeah, that's the culture of the moment, definitely.
And it should be said, too, like you said, it's complicated.
Yeah, it is.
But it also goes back to like we were talking about Mark Comfort and Odak, the Oakland Direct Action Committee.
And one of his moves is he says, like, we need to organize like the brothers on the street is the term at the time, or the brothers on the block, brothers in the corner.
And he organizes these kind of like quasi-street gangs into being these like you know radical organizations.
They have names like the Enboy Dukes and stuff, and they're like jacket clubs.
The same thing happened in Chicago.
Yeah.
Yeah, with Fred Hampton.
I mean, it was, it was, and the thing is, like, this is what I'm saying.
Like, there is like some reality to this, you know, and like, and these, like, these, especially, I think, with the Black Panther success, but it's, it's, it's just interesting because like both this primacy of the lumpen proletariat brought them success, but it was also pretty instrumental to parts of the downfall.
Because one thing that that should be mentioned that Marx talks about is the fact that like the lumpin, much like, much, much like the petite bourgeois, vacillate, it can vacillate.
And like sort of what separates them a bit from the petite bourgeois is the bribe, the form of bribery that comes from the state, right?
Where the petite bourgeois can be can be bribed with various tax cuts or you know, subsidies or something like this to their, to their, to their shops.
And like social power.
Social power, exactly.
The lump and proletariat can oftentimes be blackmailed or turned into police informers.
You saw this.
I mean, this was a huge part of the revolutionary movement in Russia, for example, especially like prior to even 1917, the terrorist movement with the socialist revolutionaries.
Granted, a lot of them were from the middle and upper classes, but the terrorist wing of that had a lot of police informers.
And it's just this repeats itself so frequently.
Yeah, I was going to say, even at like the turn of the set or turn of the 20th century, we were talking about this the other day, like these kind of like anarchist criminal gangs that were running around in like France and in Germany and you know in America, like because there just wasn't anything organized like you know in the wake of all these disasters that had unfolded in the you know late 19th century.
And so there was just like that was kind of it, these like roving gangs and it does kind of repeat itself.
But at the same time, in America, you have this sort of, I don't know how else to say it, but like thirsty intellectual class emerging in the 60s and 70s out of the new left and like other kinds of college now.
Well, yeah, and especially in Berkeley, right?
Like where there are these sort of like, yeah, very hungry.
I should say hungry, not thirsty.
Although I know I really paint a very important picture there, but it's, you know, everyone is searching for, and this, we still live in this legacy.
What is the revolutionary subject?
What is the new revolutionary subject?
Like, what can be the next one?
What can be the next one?
And, you know, some of that is, you know, people, I think a lot of it is coming from a genuine, real place.
Yeah.
But also some of it, especially as we move through the decades, is coming from a place of wanting to sell books and wanting to sell lecture series.
I just remember I was walking on the TL one day, the Tenderloin in San Francisco, which is a, let's say, depressed neighborhood.
Depressed.
And someone had put up all these stickers that said arm the homeless.
And it was like, obviously, some anarchist group that had done it or whatever, because it was like had some shit on it.
I just remember being like, bro, do not give everyone here guns.
What are you talking about?
Like, that is literally anarchy.
Like, I don't, it's, it's, but it's the same thing where like people, people that sounds like a fake lips of TikTok bullshit thing.
Yeah, I mean, this is very much prior to that.
But like, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
It feels like somebody.
The stickers are still around.
That would be used to frame up the bunch of stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's, you call it whatever you want.
It's definitely radicalism, but it's, it's certainly divorced from any coherent form of Marxism or any extant form of political organizing that has ever been successful to say, though, that like, yeah, so there's like fetishization of the black radical.
There's this romanticization with the outlaw figure and the lumpin.
The Black Panther Party's house band is called the Lumpen.
Yeah, they are.
Which are really good, actually.
Yeah.
They've got some great tracks.
Black Radical Mentality Analysis00:03:59
There's also, like, I mean, it was kind of like, there was this strategic thinking that the Panthers were doing.
Like, George Jackson explicitly says, like, we were trying to turn the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.
Yeah.
So it was like, there was this kind of class analysis of like, there's this kind of, you know, basically like surplus population of underemployed, you know, criminalized black youth that has political potential.
And obviously they did because so many of them became the names we know of famous black revolutionary.
That's what I'm saying.
It's like, it's the thing is, like, their analysis objectively was correct to an extent, right?
Right.
But like, the thing is, I think, I think, just like, just from a, from a sort of almost like a detached perspective, the pitfalls of that, which have been noted in, you know, in political writing for centuries, of the lumpin as this revolutionary force, it also that that existed as well, right?
Like there was this mad, I mean, especially with something like a program like COINTELPRO, which we'll get to, and which we've covered extensively on this show, but the FBI's program of spying, assassinations, infiltration, and everything else throughout the 1960s, 1970s, that especially targeted black groups, but all the radical underground.
You know, like it was, there were vulnerabilities to that.
And like, I mean, that is just what happened, right?
Like, like history happened as it happened.
And we see what I don't know how to end that sentence.
Here's a period.
Well, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of slippage in this period between the revolutionary cell and the radical organization and the criminal gang.
There's a real slippage that happens, and some of it is of necessity.
Like if you're organizing in a prison, your group, if it's not approved by the state, is a gang.
Yeah.
Like it is de facto a gang.
And there's other reasons that kind of like criminal organization are like a necessary component of revolutionary struggle.
But I think from where we're sitting historically, we can kind of clearly see these as two different kinds of organizations.
And in this moment, that's not that clear.
Like the fact that a group looks like a criminal gang and like does stuff like rob banks and beat people up and you know has this kind of like macho criminal swagger is not a sign that they're like not political.
It's a sign that they might be extremely political.
Yes.
I mean that's it's an interesting thing too, especially in relation to these groups is that like if you rob a bank, you robbed a bank.
But is it expropriation or is it a bank robbery?
Right.
And like, especially with a group like Tribal Thumb, you know what I mean?
Well, obviously history turns out one way.
I think we should talk about Vacaville really quick.
Yeah.
And I think we should talk about the Symbonese Liberation Army.
Totally.
The SLA.
Totally.
Because Vacaville is well, I'm going to say it's a little, it's a cow town north of the bay.
Of course.
South of Sac.
Famously.
It's kind of famous for being kind of a shitty town.
I mean, I'm not going to mince words here.
It's like, it's the Central Valley North, right?
Like, it's like a kind of depressed area.
And there is a medical facility there.
And it's from, that's where Papa Roach is from.
Suffocation, no breathing, don't give a fuck.
Is where Papa Roach is from.
They are.
And because they filmed a video for Cut My Life Instagram.
I was supposed to be in that video shoot.
Liz was supposed to be in that video shoot.
And I know it was in that video shoot.
My friend is in it.
One of the guys, I mean, I don't know him very well, but one of the guys from Vacaville's pretty much only punk band from the time, Monster Squad, who not my kind of music, but you know, respect was in that music video.
Jessica Mitford's Expose00:04:25
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, Papa Roach doesn't really figure into our Vacaville town, but now we're going to.
Yeah, we're going to have to find the connections because I'm sure they exist.
Yeah.
You want to jump into the Vacaville medical facility?
Yeah.
California medical facility at Vacaville.
Yeah.
So it opens in 55.
And the kind of stuff that we'll get into talking about Vacaville is really happening in the 60s.
And you might, you, you all might know more about this, but there's like basically early on a long history of CIA-funded experiments happening on prisoners at this facility.
It's opened up as a kind of like psychiatric wing of the prison system.
This is also when like the Department of Mental Health in California still exists.
Right.
You know?
But it's kind of opened up in 55.
There's actually a communist, famous Communist Party member, Jessica Mitford from the Bay Area, who writes like an expose about the prison system in California and talks about what she calls the, yeah, the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, saying over the past 10 years, this is in 73, so it's kind of talking about what's going on in the 60s.
I actually have to, I have to interrupt really quickly.
Jessica Mitford is, yes, a famous member of the Communist Party USA, but she's also one of the beautiful Mitford sisters.
She is.
You know how everyone's like, how many handshakes to Adolf Hitler?
For her, it is one handshake to be her sisters.
But she also, she was, yeah, like that.
They have a great story, but these sisters, this aristocratic family from England, some became very high-ranking, not only fascists, but like within the Nazi Party of Germany apparatus, like married into it.
Didn't she date Hitler?
Jessica Mitford didn't.
No, no, no.
Unity Mitford, her sister.
She didn't date Hitler.
They were a sort of item.
That's what I was saying.
No, no, no, no.
Hitler didn't fuck anybody ever.
Hitler fucked his niece.
Is that true?
Well, there's no proof that Hitler fucked his niece, but his niece blew her head off.
Wouldn't you?
Yeah, but no, before, like in like 34 or whatever.
In his apartment, and people were like, interesting what was going on there.
And she was 14.
Well, Unity, who sort of dates, this is so far afield, but Unity, who sort of dates Hitler, also tries to blow her head off after the war breaks out between England and Germany.
And she does it with a ceremonial pistol.
She was gifted by Hitler, and she fails to kill herself.
And she lives in this like horrible limbo, painful state for years.
Wow.
That's what you get for fucking around with Hitler.
And to connect to my dad, he once met Jessica Mitford at KPFS.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Just on a Jessica Mitford note, her memoirs rule.
Hans and Rebels.
Hans and Rebels, the first one.
The second one is about her time in the Communist Party in the Bay, and it's called The Final Conflict.
I should read that.
It's so really good.
And she has two records, one with Maya Angelou and one without, where she sings pop songs.
And the one with Maya Angelou is her singing the novelty song, Right Said Fred.
Right Said Fred, both of us together, one each, him and stay the ESP girl.
That the band that did I'm Too Sexy is named after.
It's her and Maya Angelou singing Right Said Fred, the old novelty song.
And she has another record where she sings Maxwell's Silver Hammer.
There was physical, started that a physical science in the earth.
No way!
Yeah, Jessica Mitford absolutely rules.
She's so cool.
She also wrote The American Way of Death of that famous book.
And then that's her big expose of the Britain, just totally even more far afield.
Britain has these weird families, but for some reason, like every member of it is like a crazy fucking polymath.
I mean, not that every member of the Mitford sisters is a polymath, but like connected to history in all these strange ways.
Anyways, so she went to Vacaville.
Jessica Mitford's Legacy00:00:30
All right.
Let's wrap this up.
I'm Liz.
My name is Brace.
We're, of course, joined by producer Young Jomsky.